Maelstrom Quotes

A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

Primo Levi

Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things-racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness-but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.

Dennis Lehane

Thus ends the voyage under the seas. What passed during that night - how the boat escaped from the eddies of the maelstrom - how Ned Land, Conseil, and myself ever came out of the gulf, I cannot tell.

Jules Verne

I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.

Marlon Brando

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

Harold Pinter

Do you know freedom exists in a school book Did you know madmen are running our prisons Within a jail Within a gaol Within a white free protestant maelstrom We're perched headlong on the edge of boredom We're reaching for death on the end of a candle We're trying for something that's already found us.

Jim Morrison

It's easy enough to predict that there will be conflict, but you place yourself in a maelstrom when you offer a view about the conflict, and I don't have an investment in one side or the other; I feel compassion for both sides. I've spent a fair amount of time in Gaza and Israel, done a lot of reporting and lived over there, and the tragedy is sometimes overwhelming. At the same time, America does have an investment in what happens.

Lawrence Wright

But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough-who denies it?-but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down.

Michael Shea

The more you head into the maelstrom, the more vulnerable you are, of course. But it's what you owe to whatever gift you have.

Ellen McLaughlin

I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it. (John Keegan)

If I had political responsibility, I would want to prepare for a plan B that would foresee that the European currency union, that the eurozone, no longer necessarily consists of 17 member states. And that means to make provisions so that other countries are not pulled into the maelstrom through contagion.

Peer Steinbruck

I would love to be a voice in this maelstrom of chaos and obsessive celebrity infatuation that says, 'Let's talk about something that matters'.

Zachary Quinto

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Steven Pinker

Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change.

Neil Postman

I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am; Maelström of passions in that hidden sea Whose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me; And in small compass the dark waters cram.

Mervyn Peake

The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn't decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.

Rosa Luxemburg

The conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot.

Peter J. Carroll

The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination: every penis is made less by every vagina, just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature. The vagina dentata is part of the Romantic revival of pagan myth. It is subliminally present in Poe's voracious maelstrom and dank, scythe-swept pit. It overtly appears in the bible of French Decadence, Huysmans's A Rebours (1884), where a dreamer is magnetically drawn towards mother nature's open thighs, the "bloody depths” of a carnivorous flower rimmed by "swordblades.”.

Camille Paglia